Southern Cuisine is Flavored with a Troubled Past, Bright Future

Southern Soul Food

The American South is known for its incredibly delicious dishes, with a stick-to-your-ribs home-cooking style that can't be matched anywhere else. The Southern Foodways Alliance is traveling all over the South to document the stories through food history with a mission of healing the deep racial scars of the region.

ABC News

Southern Soul Food

The American South is known for its incredibly delicious dishes, with a stick-to-your-ribs home-cooking style that can't be matched anywhere else. The Southern Foodways Alliance is traveling all over the South to document the stories through food history with a mission of healing the deep racial scars of the region.

ABC News

Southern Soul Food

The horrible legacy of slavery in the South yielded an inventive and now-celebrated cuisine. Slaves learned how to cook with the humblest ingredients, such as peas, rice and parts of a pig, to create a feast.

ABC News

Southern Soul Food

Many Southern recipes have been passed down through generations of severe poverty, dating back to before the Civil War, the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.

ABC News

Southern Soul Food

Scott's BBQ in Hemingway, S.C. is one stop on the Alliance's food-with-roots tour. "This joint, Scott's BBQ, is to me the best place I can imagine for a barbecue road trip, to get in touch with where this food started," said John T. Edge, who is the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance.

ABC News

Southern Soul Food

Scott's BBQ owner Rodney Scott poses here with Edge and ABC News correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi. Scott said his family has been working in wood-fired barbecue pits for generations.

ABC News

Southern Soul Food

Scott chops down his own trees to fuel the pits to cook his pigs, which come from the three counties surrounding Hemingway. In talking about his barbecue joint, Scott said, "To me, personally, it's like a meeting place for everybody to come. They come in to get the barbecue and barbecue is like another word for togetherness."

ABC News

Southern Soul Food

Another stop on the tour is Bertha's in North Charleston, S.C., a hole-in-the-wall café named after the matriarch of the Grant family. The ladies have been frying chicken here since the late 1970s. "A lot of times when [people] ask 'what does Southern soul food mean?' we try to tell them it's food from the heart and it always make your stomach good when you eat it," said Julia, one of Bertha's three daughters.